Kezia Dugdale's flirtation with the SNP doesn't make her a traitor – it makes her a normal person

The revelation was unhelpful to Dugdale (though it might yet prove even less helpful to the SNP politician in question who, it might be assumed, was less than discreet about confidential job applications sent to his office). This is the woman on whom, after all, the hopes and fears (more of the latter these days) are pinned, the woman that bruised, battered and inexplicably optimistic Labour activists hope will be Scotland’s next First Minister.

And now, we are invited to believe, it turns out that Dugdale is the first politician in British history to indulge in a youthful indiscretion while she was a student. Bad luck.

Such accidents are more easily forgiven the further back in time they appeared. But when your timeline is as short as Dugdale’s, and when political memories as long as they are in Scottish Labour, it doesn’t look good.

The problem, if there is one, is that Dugdale’s rise from parliamentary researcher to leader of her party has been, as she admitted herself at the weekend, “meteoric”. At the age of 26 she was working for Labour MSP George Foulkes Four years later she was an MSP. Less than five extraordinary and dramatic years after that (for her party, anyway) she was Scottish Labour’s leader and candidate for First Minister. And all before her 35th birthday.

When I stood, valiantly and suicidally, for the same post at the top of Scottish Labour back in 2011, I somehow forgot to mention that as a student I had been an actual member – fully paid up and everything – of the Conservative Party. It just never came up.

In my defence, it was all a big con trick by Tory student activists at the college I had just enrolled in. During Freshers’ Week 1983 I had been invited to join the Conservative Club. I was also asked to join the Socialist Workers Party, the Gay and Lesbian Society and the Vegans. I declined all invitations but the lonely bloke at the Tory stand said: “If you just sign your name we’ll send you some leaflets. No obligation.”

I should have known better.

A month later a letter arrived, inside which was my Conservative Party membership card, an invitation to a cheese and wine fundraiser and a letter which began with the salutation (I kid you not) “Dear Prime Minister lover…” I had to hide the envelope from my mum, who was seriously suspicious of the package until I reassured her it was just pornography.

It turned out that the Conservative Club at the college had to enroll a minimum number of new members to qualify for some student grant or other and it made financial sense to pay the dues of unwitting (and naïve) students. I did not renew my membership after my first year.

"The SNP’s attempt to throw dirt at Kezia Dugdale marks the low point of this Holyrood election campaign." https://t.co/0M4zFRdcf3

While such episodes can be laughed off, there are undoubtedly those in Scotland who wish to do harm to Dugdale and, through her, to Scottish Labour. They should pause for a second.

Politicians love to boast about how perfect their parties and personal philosophies are, to the extent that any party that opposes them must, by definition, be beyond the pale, immoral if not actually evil. Thus can the parties portray themselves as the only possible option for voters who still value being able to sleep at night with a clear conscience.

By perpetrating this fiction, they do the voters a disservice. Voters are more likely to jump between the parties if the gap looks narrow enough to do so without injury. Your average Scottish voter who may have voted Labour for years, feels able to support the SNP instead, not because he thinks the two parties are utterly dissimilar in every respect, but because he sees them as pretty much the same.

So here’s the leader of Scottish Labour, who once flirted with working for an SNP MSP. If she’d actually got the job she may well have taken a different path from the one that ended up where she is now.

What kind of message does that send to the voters? That Dugdale is an opportunist, is unprincipled? Hardly. More likely they will conclude that, like most voters, she was briefly willing to give the other side a chance. Like most voters, she saw in the two main Scottish parties decent people with decent policies pursuing a similar left-of-centre progressive agenda.

Voters are regularly assumed to reject the tribal politics that keeps our party system going. That being the case, Dugdale is more in touch with the electorate than any of her rivals.